We Should Talk: Western History and Western Literature in Dialogue

Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West. By Patricia Nelson Limerick. W. W. Norton & Company, 2000

Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women's Writing. By Krista Comer. University of North Carolina Press, 1999

The Cultures of the American New West. By Neil Campbell. Edinburgh University Press, 2000

American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States, and the Erotics of Culture. By José E. Limón. Beacon Press, 1998.

At the very beginning of his new book, Marriage, Violence, and the Nation in the American Literary West, William R. Handley announces his intention "to demonstrate why literary and historical imaginations should not be thought about separately, and to employ an intertextual methodology that insists on bringing the two together by locating the historical in the literary and vice versa, rather than by treating one as the 'background' of the other" (1). The impulse to level the boundary separating history and literature is widely shared among regional literary scholars who believe that the distinction between the "imagined" West and the "real" West cannot be sustained. "Historically," Handley insists, "the analogy between marriage and the nation has had profound effects" (3). In contextualizing that analogy as it informs popular and canonical texts by Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joan Didion, and Wallace Stegner, he finds that failures of domestic union in Western fiction form windows on dominant cultural assumptions about the nation and its people. Riders of the Purple Sage, for example, with its attention to Mormon polygamy, affords us a measure of "the contradictions and anxieties inherent in American beliefs about racial and sexual identity...and of the relationship between the law and religious freedom" (97). Handley insists that such texts are as faithful an index to important social and cultural realities as any we are likely to come across.

In his afterword, having underscored "the imbrication of literary and historical forms of knowledge," Handley draws the disciplinary debate into bold relief: "What do western literary critics want from western historians and their writing of history," he asks, "and what do historians want from literature and literary theory?" (224). The answer coming from the literary camp is fairly straightforward. Historians who dismiss Western literature as mythmaking and who pride themselves on taking the lead in setting the story straight err both in their unwitting reinforcement of the myth they propose to demolish and in failing to recognize that Western literature has been self-correcting in this regard right from the start. It follows for Handley that what literary critics want from history is "a confession of bad faith in their claims to originality...and a recognition of the historical value of literature for their own revisionist enterprise" (226). Further, and because they regard narrative as a form of representation, as an inherently interested construction, the critics also want the historians to defend their claims of unmediated access to "facts," "reality," and "the truth" about the past—claims upon which the putative boundary between the disciplines principally rests.

The answer from the other side is less clear. This is so because the historians have been less willing than their literary counterparts to engage in debate. Perhaps they do not take the complaints seriously; perhaps, on the other hand, they are reluctant to enter a discussion that so directly challenges their disciplinary foundations. One suspects it is something of both. Whatever the case, Handley notes the lack of anything approaching a clear disciplinary consensus on the matter and turns for a response to historian William Cronon's prizewinning essay, "A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative." Cronon, he finds, concedes the postmodern view that narrative is never neutral and always an artifice, but demands nonetheless that it provide us with "a moral or values that are a guide to living" (Cronon 1374). Here, Handley observes, we are brought to the nub of "the...